Peter Tomka, Paternity Test
Text by Evan Moffitt

“Photography,” a compound word for “writing in light,” got its name from an astronomer, a reader of stars. This was in 1839, when John Herschel heard that an image of the moon had been transferred onto a copper plate by Louis Daguerre, the medium’s grandaddy. Like astronomers, photographers since Daguerre have spent a lot of time in dark places, where it’s easier to catch cosmic rays. They learned that any aperture through which light passes can be a camera, and that the universe is full of such holes. Photography’s dream is that it can slow down that light, like ink drying on a page. What it writes in light is a necessary fiction about the stuff from which we’re all made.

What makes a man, then? Or an artist? There’s flesh and blood and space dust, and then there are things which can’t so easily be quantified. Desire, that magnetic force holding our human world together, comprises one’s character more than any single subatomic particle. For queer people, “chosen family” are more vital than biological science or genealogy. We get a clearer picture of who we are in images of who we want and want to be. Peter Tomka’s Paternity Test subjects one such club to the vagaries of photographic chemistry: paper soaked in fixative, exposed, and left to dry under the light of a full moon. The men and women in these pictures––friends, lovers, celebrity idols and other stars in the cultural firmament––are among the artist’s many moms and dads. Spiritual kin who showed him how to be gay. Tomka projected their images digitally through a homemade gloryhole, that kinky gay aperture, collapsing his photographic darkroom with the darkrooms frequented by men for anonymous sex. The result is a queer and incestual form of procreation, one which links the observations of astronomers with the more earthly aspects of creative reproduction. Stars die all the time, and from their scattered energy new stars are born.

And such stars as these: Montgomery Clift and John Ireland in Howard Hawks’ deliciously homoerotic buddy Western, “Red River” (1948), rubbing their revolvers together like two cowboys from a Bob Mizer photograph. Or Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis from the steamy Roman bath scene in “Spartacus” (1960). Famous painters abound: Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns. Most of them, though not all, were gay. More important, however, were the ways that Tomka’s fathers coded sex and sexuality within their work, so it could be implied but left unsaid. These photographs and their sources ask us to infer something beyond the visible spectrum, like the rainbow a prism releases from a beam of light. It’s fitting too that Tomka projected these men cinematically through his gloryhole camera, when they lived much of their offscreen lives in the dark.

Women are even more frequently the subjects of gay male identification, and there are at least two women here. Yozmit and Susannah are caught in dappled light and shadow like midcentury movie stars. The androgynous artist and musician Sean DeLear, whom Tomka photographed outside a bar in the 2010s, is a reminder that queer fathers have no time for the patriarchy. The lineages of Paternity Test are unbound by sex and gender.

Tomka’s series had a brief but complicated birth. He exposed all the photographs in the span of a single night, during a full moon, hanging the large sheets of treated paper from an outdoor clothesline to dry. For the last several years, he’s run a gallery called No Moon adjacent to his Los Angeles studio, its exhibition calendar fixed to the lunar cycle. Recent scientific studies suggest we sleep less during a full moon; folk wisdom says we get more fertile and hornier. All the better then for a moment of late-night artistic conception. Most cultures see the moon as a holy parent, one whose gender varies across traditions and time. Constant, though, is the belief that its nocturnal emissions release something from the earth and from within ourselves. On the night Tomka developed Paternity Test, the skies above LA let drop a rare and unexpected midnight shower.

The surfaces of these photographs are visibly streaked with rain. Despite all the atmospheric ejaculate, however, the results of Paternity Test remain open to interpretation. Like sex, photography is partly a product of chance, and much of Tomka’s process is about the aspects he can’t control. In this sense, he shares an affinity with ancient cosmographers, scholars of the heavens who believed that forces like light and gravity could be mapped, measured, and even channeled, but that they worked on our own bodies in more ungraspable ways. The only image in Tomka’s series that isn’t a photograph depicts such a cosmographer: a painting once attributed to Caravaggio, now known as “Scholar Expounding” by the Master of “The Lute Player,” after undergoing the paternity tests of art historians. Handsome, erudite, and self-possessed, the painting’s subject knew nothing of photography, but it’s not hard to imagine what he’d photograph if he did. For him, too, the secrets of the world were written in light. And his dirty fingers––smeared with ink or other filth which Tomka enlarges big enough for us to see in a close-crop––have surely known many secrets. They curl into a soft opening just big enough to let the knowledge in.